Welcome to Microholding Science. I cook, I grow, I forage and brew from a tiny space in a town in the Midlands, UK. Calling this a smallholding would be wildly generous, hence the name. As a former country bumpkin growing up in the New Forest national park I miss many aspects of the rural life. In this blog I hope to share some of the things I do in my small space and it’s surroundings around a full time job to try and live a little more sustainably, a little more cheaply and a little more from the land around me. I hope you enjoy it, please do comment with questions and suggestions etc.
Brewery microbiologyGreen hop challengeEven Faster Pizza!Improper Job – A brew kit review.Molecular Gastronomy ExperimentsGyoza dumplings, Chinese New Year pt3Szechuan pepper beer stir-fry, Singapore noodles and egg fried rice. Chinese New Year pt2Chinese New Year pt 1: yuk sung and spring rollsA Season’s Beer – fruity!Peak Pulled Pork.Beefroot curry and a beety omelette.Wild Plum Jam and the Chip Pan CheatGooseberries and the Half Savory SoupA Very Flowery Preserve: Rose Petal JamCheap chicken and tiny potato stewEnglish Wine and the Leamington Beer and Music FestivalHaphazard Horticulture part 2Bio-control: Roses and Nasturtiums, not as pointless as you’d think!Tandoori fried Halloumi and Tarka DaalHaphazard Horticulture.Dishwasher fish. The steaming device you didn’t know you had.Everything in the hole! Savoury and sweet.Madagascan Vanilla Stout: Part 2, Bottling, capping and alcohol.Mutton dressed as…mutton; Moroccan styleMadagascan Vanilla Stout: Part 1, prep, recipe and fermentation.Super speedy prawns and seafood allergiesThe Great Burger DebateSupermarket taxonomyKedgeree – a fishy treat!Duck in Dam-sin SauceGo-to Halloumi starterBreaking down a birdBig feed: PaellaBeautiful beetroot and ‘ugly’ BeetGoat pieNEVER BUY PIZZA!Steak on a rubbish hobThe amazing quince!The winter pear problem
Recently I gave a talk at Coventry Home Brew Club hosted by Twisted Barrel brewery. The brewers, while a knowledgeable and experienced audience, seemed to enjoy my talk on the microbiology and biochemistry of beer. As part of the evening we did a bit of sampling in the brewery to see just what lives where. The results are in!
We conducted 3 experiments. The first was using drop plates, these are standard nutrient agar plates simply placed around the room and left open for the duration of the evening, then closed and incubated. Here’s what we got:
Left to right: the plate placed between the fermenters in the brewery area, the plate on the brewery end of the bar and the plate on the door end of the bar.
As you can see the venue gets cleaner the further into it you go. This isn’t surprising given one key factor, people! In Twisted Barrel the tap house and tables are nearest the door so that’s where the people are. Further I suspect rather more sterilising solution is sloshed around the brewery end.
Each dot, or colony, on the plates represents where one original bacteria fell onto the agar during the evening and grew into a pile large enough to see. Fewer dots, fewer microbes dropping on the plate. We can also make educated guesses about the species (or at least family/genus) of the microbes from the shape and colour of the colony. This isn’t 100% as many species look very similar from just a colony assessed with the naked eye. Let’s look one by one.
The Brewery. Mostly round smooth colonies indicating bacteria with the white being e.coli and the yellow staphylococcus aureus. Entirely normal bacteria associated with the skin and gut.Similar story on the brewery end of the bar with 2 interesting additions, the pink colony near the edge at 9 o’clock is likely to be Salmonella enteritidis of poultry and dairy fame (may seem surprising in vegan land but it’s a common species) and at about 4 o’clock we have a mould likely Penicillium. We also have a higher cell count.The door end. As above with a few more fungal species and again, a higher cell count. Nothing out of the ordinary here.
What we’re showing here is people come with bacteria and as I said in my talk there is no such thing as a microbial vacuum. You cant get rid of them and nor should you try to; more and more these bacterial species are being shown to have an important role in our health and development. However I would caution against calling them “good” or “bad” bacteria, that’s just media/public health simplification. It’s all about where you find them, in what number and how able you are to fend them off.
Staphylococcus will be found on the skin of 100% of the humans in the world and it generally does no harm but get it in your blood and it will kill you. If you’re unfortunate enough to find a version a little more resistant to antibiotics than it’s pals, say methicillin for example and you have methicillin resistant staphylococcus aureus – MRSA. E.coli is found in 100% of human guts and as such on our skin, our clothes, in our mouths etc. It is the most studied organism in the world and the one that is the most shockingly generically named. Two E.coli bacteria can be as much as 75% genically different and we will still call them both E.coli. However a human is only 50% genetically different from a banana! What this means is 99% of the time you live in blissful harmony with these bugs but get a dose of E.coli O157:H7 in the wrong place and expect the worst food poisoning imaginable due to a dose of the Shiga toxin this variant produces.
I say all this before showing you the results of experiment 2, fingerprints! Here we go.
The first fingerprint plate.
I think we can clearly see captain clean here is ‘MJR’ just a few e.coli here, impressive! Did you even touch the plate? remember it’s number of individual colonies we are looking for so ‘Frank’ and the slice next to ‘MJR’, (something like ‘J?S’?), for both diversity and number of microbes I think you win….or should that be lose?
Same plate from the other side. the only other thing to say is whoever was the section between JKC and our champion bacteria bearer needs to check in on the definition of the word ‘gently’ in the context of “place your finger gently on the jelly”! 🙂
Second plate
I think this one speaks for itself. Clear filth-monger ‘MP’ clearly champion of this plate; I recommend against hand shaking! I’d say ‘CT’ takes the honours at the other end of the hygiene spectrum here.
the other side of plate 2.plate 3 of fingerprints
Someone introduced a fungi onto this plate which accounts for the cloudiness however I think I can safely say the fingerprints at 6 o’clock and 9 o’clock have to take the overall winner’s medal eclipsing the plates that went before. 6 o’clock on this is particularly rich in individual e.coli colonies and seeing as they’re generally associated with the gut it raises some questions about certain hand based procedures after certain elimination drills. What I’m trying to say politely is if you’re at a finger buffet with this guy hold off and go to the chippy on the way home!
Lastly, the swabs. Beard’s seemed a particularly popular target which I have to say, doesn’t help bust those home brew club stereotypes much at all!
2 beards and a fermenter here
I’m going to have to disappoint the proprietor as the swab left in Carl’s beard didn’t yield much of anything. Either he’s obsessively clean or more likely just putting the swab in the beard halfway down, which let’s face it is quite some distance from his actual face, wasn’t enough to pick up a good sample. No Lactobacillus here I’m afraid my friend. The other beard is more akin to a skin swab with most of the bacteria the same as the fingers so overall I declare no overall winner in the Twisted Barrel beard-off. There’s a sentence!
Lastly, the fermenter. Good work guys, nice and clean, the only small colonies there look to be yeast. The single e.coli probably came of a finger or the swab itself or from the air.
So there we have it! If you can identify any of the people I cannot please comment with who they are and I hope you all found this fun and helpful.
My lack of posts of late has not been due to lack of brew/cook/garden/science goodness. Oh no, I got married! Turns out weddings are quite a bit of work, especially when you have this as a venue:
More things should happen in domes.Especially when stage lights make the inside look like this!
Inevitably with weddings come in-laws and I’ve been very fortunate with mine. My father in law has an impressively diverse, conservation themed, food producing, acre or two in the hills on the Wiltshire/Dorset boarder which groans with more wildflowers than you’ve ever seen.
It was only after visiting post honeymoon that I noticed he was growing hops! These had never been used for beer and apparently were only there as caterpillars like the leaves. Butterfly conservation and the stunning textile art of Jane E. Hall being an important part of what happens here. To let another year go by without using these little cones of joy would be a crying shame I’m sure you can agree. The variety is unknown, some kind of Golding is my best guess but I couldn’t leave them to just fall to the ground now could I?
The harvest is on.
Knowing when a Hop is ready to be picked is something I had no idea about having only used dried hops and oils before, but I found this video very helpful:
Thanks BobbyfromNJ!
As it happened most of these were spot on however quantities were quite low so we may have picked some a little on the young side.
A small harvest but I can’t complain about the setting!
Green hopped beer has the potential to be a different and interesting brew; the fact the hops have not been dried should give a fresher, greener, grassier quality to the beer. However finding out how many to use and so how much beer I could make was a challenge. The best estimate I could get from a variety of sources was that when packaged hops are dried out they decrease to a fifth of their original mass. As such your hop schedule needs 5 times the mass of green hop per unit volume than a standard dried hop recipe.
I had 160g of cones so I knew this was going to be a small brew! The logic went like this:
160g green/5 = 32g dry.
20l brew has ~100g-150g dry hops depending on recipe. ~125g is some sort of median value.
the ratio 32:125 is ~= 1:4 so this will be a 5l brew.
This meant I dissolved 750g of light spray-malt extract in 2l water and started my boil.
Ignore the reading on the scales, 750g went in, evidently plonking the hops there lent something on the scale. This is all very much on the fly as I had no idea what hop I was using, less so how green hops react in the boil.
The hop schedule was made up based on what seemed sensible but I have no idea if it was the most effective way to use these hops, a few more years trial, error and improvement seems the only way. But for this year here’s what happened:
0min 45g addition.
15min 30g addition.
30min 20g addition.
45min 30g addition.
60min 20g addition.
70min flame out.
85min end of stand.
The first additionMid boil
The boil was then cooled, sieved into a small fermentation vessel, made up to 5l and a standard ale yeast added. The OG came out at 1.046 and after 5 days the FG was 1.012 giving me an estimated alcohol after secondary conditioning in the bottle of ~5% ABV.
The result has been a surprisingly mildly hopped beer with a grassy and fresh character as predicted. If this is due to the ripeness of the hops at time of picking or my methods I couldn’t say. Please comment if you have any thoughts. As a result the malt sings through leading this beer to be a little bit sweeter than I would have liked but very pleasant all the same and certainly worth the effort.
I stand buy this, as do many others but the only negative point I hear in return is “but that’s so slow!” While I disagree, OK then, here’s a recipe you can do in the same time it takes to choose, order and get delivered a flavourless grease-filled circle of sorrow from your chosen purveyor of plasticised Italian pseudo-cuisine. Ready? Go!
Make some simple dough by mixing 300g strong flour, 300ml water, 5g of fast acting yeast, 5g of salt and about 10ml of olive oil. Knead until it’s dough, break off a piece and push it out in a lightly oiled frying pan to fill the bottom and gently fry.
So far, so easy right?
Meanwhile (if you have one, use an extra person to do this at the same time, that’s what the little shop of “kwatro-fromajio” horrors will be doing!) fry some chorizo until the oil starts running.
This can be left over a medium heat while you chop the next bit – come on, come on, the competition have nearly decided which box is the plasticised cheese-a-like and which is the wall filler!
Chuck in all the below: chopped onion, courgette, garlic and celery.
Any fast cooking veg will also work, peppers, chilli, small bits of carrot etc.
Fry in the chorizo oil for a minute or two on high heat then add a tin of chopped tomatoes, some tomato puree, Worcestershire sauce, seasoning and a generous handful of ripped basil. Stir and boil.
Depending how crispy you like your base flip it over when the underside is brown and toast that side too. Once the sauce has come together dollop it on the top, cover with any grated cheese or torn mozzarella and put the whole thing under a preheated grill on maximum heat.
Quickly now, the cardboard-carrying, moped-wielding phantom of congealing synthacheese has reached his third wrong address!
Once the cheese starts to bubble we’re done (although if you’re not racing then cook to taste).
WINNNNNNNAAAAAAAA…..……..AAAAAAAAAAAAAA…….…………AAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!Suck it dough boy!
There. Now there really is no excuse!
Enjoy!
Charles
P.S. Why do pizza advertisers advertise ‘thin and crispy’ as a good thing? Surely that’s just an excuse to sell you less food for the same money? It also means you get a desolate wasteland of some kind of cardboard/plasterboard mix punctuated by the occasional ageing olive oasis or isolated slice of something that may at one time have seen some meat. And there is no excuse for this:
In case it’s not clear what’s happened here: the middle of the pizza, the best part, has been cut out and filled with salad. This leaves you with crust and salad. Just think about that – that’s what’s usually left over AFTER a pizza meal. Although stalking tables and grabbing crusts is generally frowned on. Just have a smaller pizza AND a side salad! It’s right there in the name! SIDE salad. Not “salad-of-lies-and-subterfuge-where-my-pizza-should-be”! Anyway, I digress.
Same logic as chocolate bars being called “Fun Size” when what they mean is “Small. Really small. But that’s all you need as all you do is watch Netflix and eat pizzas with holes in them.” I should be in marketing.
It’s been a long break since my last post but brewing, growing cooking and weird culinary experiments have been continuing with aplomb.
A few months back I took a step towards whole grain brewing, something there is neither the space or domestic tolerance for here at the Microholding. Having done it elsewhere and wanting to take back some more control of the beer I’m making, I tried out a system advertised as a halfway house between kit and whole grain: Crafty Brews Proper Job.
For reference, I don’t get anything from Brew Uk for writing this – in case you smell a note of commercial interest!
For details of more of the techniques, tips and tricks involved in general home brewing see some of my other brewing posts. The kit comes with all the ingredients you need to brew a replica of St Austell’s Proper Job – a hoppy, 5.5% light ale. A favourite of mine. In the kit you get a set of instructions as above and all the ingredients below
The yeast is an extra, I opted for the cheapest one.
The hop packs come numbered with reference to the instructions but if you’re interested:
9g Chinook, 9g Willamette
9g Chinook, 9g Willamette, 12g Cascade
6g Chinook, 18g Willamette, 18g Cascade
6g Chinook, 30g Willamette, 30g Cascade
You’ll need a big pan, really big! 8 litres at a minimum.
I started with this monster then had to go even bigger half way through as it got hard to stir!
The instructions are really easy to follow. Essentially, it’s a staggered addition at specific times of malts and hops with some very easy to achieve and user-friendly temperature variations.
I found it paid to be prepared.An initial addition of malts. Note the digital thermometer in the background. Useful but not absolutely essential. Results are better with careful temperature control.
First hop pack in. The aroma just gets better in your kitchen from this point on.As the boil goes on, the rest go in. Note the upgraded pan from the brewer with the poor ability to judge volume!After the final addition of hops, which happens with the heat off, the whole pan needs to be cooled fast. I opted for the pan in sink of cold water method.
Now came the fun part and probably the most tricky: filtering the hops out to get your wort into your fermenter. There are pricey special pans you can buy which have taps and filters built in, but I went for this approach:
Seive and straining bag over the bucket, somewhat cobbled together!At this point you’re in the hygiene danger zone. Good aseptic technique must be maintained, hence all the kit sitting in sterilising solution until the last moment.Filtering done, a messy job! This can all go to one side for the clean-up later.Top up your wort to the required 20L and after a check of the temperature add the yeast.Take a sample at this point, again ensuring sterility, and don’t add this back to the fermenter. The OG here reads 1.038 rather than the stated 1.055. A second reading gave me the slightly higher 1.047. This could be due to inadequate mixing on my part or a number of other reasons. However, I’m fairly confident in my technique and as such this was the only question mark I have over an otherwise excellent method.
After the primary fermentation the F.G. came down to 1.010 exactly and it was bottle conditioned with 5g of sugar per 500ml bottle. I added finings a day before the bottling to aid the clearing. This means, with the secondary sugar and the higher O.G. taken into account, we are looking at 5.3% rather than 5.5%.
After 2 weeks’ secondary fermentation and bottle conditioning the results were outstanding.
Clarity, aroma, flavour and head all excellent.
With the small issue of the specific gravities put to one side, this is an excellent kit and I would recommend it. It is exactly as advertised, a stepping stone between cans and whole grain brewing. No messing about with boiling grain and the cleaning that entails but potential for a lot of flexibility and adaptations to the recipe if you were so inclined.
In fact, with most of the first batch consumed I’ve just ordered another one! Give them a go, you won’t regret it.
Before my dearly beloved bought me a Molecule r-evolution molecular gastronomy kit I have to admit I was sceptical about the fad for bringing more and more elaborate scientific processes into the kitchen. Here in the UK we have the TV chef/entertainer/performance-foodmonger Heston Blumenthal; while I love his programmes dearly the scientist in me says the centrifuge I’ve been spinning down blood samples in and president Hassan Rouhani is no longer spinning weapons grade plutonium in probably shouldn’t have a cousin dealing with my dinner!
Just take the second band from the duck tear thin layer chromatography, run it through the NMR machine, quick check with the spectrophotometer and it’s off to CERN we go! What’s that dear? No, dinner will be about 8 years.However using things I’ve only ever used under strict lab conditions to make food out of does have quite a rule-defying pleasure in what must be the worlds least rebellious rebellious act. You know it’s good when 95% of the population either don’t understand what you’ve done when having it explained to them with diagrams or they want to write a story for the daily mail about how mad scientists are turning seaweed against us.
I DON’T EVEN HAVE A CONTROL GROUP BITCHES!!!Anyway, once I’d got over the fact I could use a pipette without easily being able to reach a gas tap it turns out this molecular gastronomy is quite fun!
Inside-out Bloody Mary
As I was outside my lab -protocol comfort zone anyway I thought I’d start with the familiar: agar Jelly. Agar is a product derived from seaweed and basically is a bloody good setting agent for anything it’s mixed with. Most commonly this is the basic nutrients bacteria need to survive to give you a surface to grow microbes on for various experiments. You can mix antibiotics into it for example to make a selective media, bacteria hunger games crossed with hunt the plasmid, or, as it turn out mix various food products to make tasty, if confusing, treats.
What we have here is a Bloody Mary mixed with Agar and set in celery stems with balsamic vinegar beads and ripped basil.
For the beads:
place a cylinder of cheap oil in the freezer for 30 mins, it doesn’t matter what the container is as long as it’s tall. I use a measuring cylinder (yes, I have measuring cylinders in my kitchen I’m a scientist, what do you want!). Take 220 ml of balsamic vinegar, boil and add 2g of Agar.
I’ve converted from the “1/2 a cup” specified because seriously, what the f**k is a cup anyway? come on USA, get with the metric programme!
Come on my American friends if you can give us cheese in a can surely the humble litre isn’t too much to ask? Not using the metric system: It’s the USA, Liberia and Myanmar (Burma)!Anyway. once your oil is cold and your agar/vinegar boiling get a pipette (yes yes, see above!), suck up some of the simmering mixture and drop it a drip at a time into the cold oil. As the mixture sinks it hardens the agar and doesn’t mix with the oil as that’s how uncharged hydrophobic lipid molecules (oil) and polar hydrophilic molecules (water/balsamic vinegar) roll.
From my other recipe, hence the colour of the beadsRinse the beads well through a sieve and set aside. Do the same process with all the ingredients of a Bloody Mary but this time lay out some celery stalks with the end taped across with sticky tape (don’t worry, you’re cutting this bit off) and instead of dropping the mixture through oil simply pour into the celery moulds.
Chop the stalks when the gel has set, pile them onto a plate and sprinkle with the beads and the chopped basil.
Nice alternative to a saladMore recently I was doing a dinner party and the instructions were:
“Nothing ‘xmas’ like and low-ish in fat”
I prepared a three course Caribbean dinner (separate post for the first two) and this was the desert:
Mango porcupine, whipped coconut cream, lime agar domes and a rum lime foam.
Cut the cheeks (2 hefty slices either side of the stone) off a mango. Using the point of your knife cut a pattern of squares in the mango trying not to cut through the skin. push up the middle to turn it inside out and place on the plate. For the cream mix only the solid coconut cream from a can of coconut milk (i.e. leave the watery milk for the other parts below) with a small pot of whipping cream (yes I know I was asked for low fat!). whip until firm, serve.
The beads and domes were made as above in the Bloody Mary recipe except using coconut milk, nutmeg, lime juice and lime zest with the agar.
As above except using a mould for the domes.For the foam you need another reagent, Soy Lecithin.
All this does is stabilise bubbles in any mixture you make giving you a foam you can serve. I mixed rum, vanilla sugar, lime and coconut milk together with 2 grams of the soy and beat with an electric blender.
The beating takes a while to give enough foam But it gets there!Top the mango with the foam, sprinkle the beads and place a dome. You’re ready to serve!
Good fun for a dinner party, not something I’d do every day.
And now to take on the classic, the famous, the….strictly not exclusively Chinese, Gyoza dumplings. These delicious little packages of joy were a major hit at my first Chinese New Year party last year and are the climax of my series of CNY posts ahead of the year of the monkey.
As an amateur in the world of dumplings I’m not going to get hung up on the taxonomy of dumplings as I’d not really do it justice but there is an excellent description here. Many of the methods of cooking mentioned in that post I tried, and they are all excellent, regardless of origin. But first, the filling.
Filling ingredients
500g pork or chicken mince, I went with a bit of both
1 head pak choi
fresh root ginger
3 garlic cloves
salt
black pepper
spring onion
ground chilli flakes
sesame oil
oyster sauce
pinch sugar
Chop the ingredients finely then mix all of the chicken/pork filling ingredients together in a large mixing bowl to a thick paste. Add plenty of salt and freshly ground black pepper then chill in the fridge until needed.
Skin ingredients
300g strong white flour
½ tsp fine salt
200ml boiling water
vegetable oil, for frying
1 tbsp sesame oil
Method
Sift the flour into a large bowl and mix in the salt. Stir in enough of the boiling water until the mixture comes together as a dough. Roll the dough into a ball, cover with cling film and set aside to rest for one hour.
Ready to go
Turn out the dough onto a floured work surface, knead for five minutes until smooth and elastic.
Roll out one third of the dough onto a lightly floured work surface. Stretch and turn the dough until the gyoza dough is as thin as possible.
Using a 10cm cutter, cut discs from the dough.
Once the dough has all been cut hold a gyoza skin in your palm, add one teaspoon of the filling mixture.
Wet the edges using your fingertip and seal the dumpling, pinching along the edges to create a pleated fan effect like a mini Cornish pasty.
Fill all the dumplings and set aside on a floured plate.
cooking
Fry, steam, fry
Heat the vegetable oil in a large frying pan with a lid over a high heat. Arrange the gyoza in the pan leaving space between each one until the bottoms are golden-brown. Don’t burn them!
Add approximately 100ml of water to the pan, cover with the lid and steam the dumplings for a further two minutes.
Shake the pan to release the gyoza and continue to cook for a further two minutes with the lid off, until the filling is completely cooked.
Steam
Oil the base of your steamers and/or cover them with greaseproof paper punctured so the steam can circulate.
Place the dumplings in the steamer so they don’t touch.
Steam until they are cooked. Approximately 10 mins.
Poach
get a pan of salted water to a rolling boil and drop in the dumplings a few at a time.
boil for 5 mins.
Deep Fry
heat a pan of oil until very hot.
drop the dumplings in a couple at a time.
Don’t let them stick together.
Do not burn kitchen down!
Combine soy sauce, chilli oil and lime juice for the dipping sauce, or serve with sweet chilli sauce, hoi sin or any other sauce of your choice.
These were fantastic and even better the next day with a good cuppa. Now that’s fusion!
As I said in my last post February 8th this year is Chinese new year. Not having done much Chinese cooking before last year I thought Chinese New Year was a good opportunity to experiment, learn a few things and feed some friends. The results were good, so good I’m doing it all again this year.
The main course of beef, noodles and rice were spicy good fun but as with the last 2 recipes required masses of prep and organisation. This much to be precise! I must apologise for the lack of photos as cooking was fairly chaotic at climax time. More will be added as I do these recipes again.
These are for the whole meal, not just the mains thankfully!
First up:
Szechuan pepper beef stir-fry
The marinade
1 tbsp Shaoxing rice wine
Szechuan pepper (corns or ground, these are the ones that make your mouth go numb in a pleasing way and no, ordinary black pepper wont do!)
1 tsp dark soy sauce
½ tsp Chinese five-spice powder
2 garlic cloves, crushed and finely chopped
2 sirloin steaks, cut into strips
The Stock
beef bones
garlic
onion
salt
Szechuan pepper corns
celery
bay leaves
The stir fry
2 tbsp groundnut or sesame oil
red chilli
½ onion
broccoli,
mangetout
carrots,
baby corn,
300ml hot fresh beef stock
1 tbsp light soy sauce
1 tbsp cornflour mixed with 2 tbsp cold water
spring onion
Preparation method
Mix all the marinade ingredients in a bowl. Add the strips of beef, mix well and leave to marinate overnight.
Make your stock by boiling up the beef bones, garlic, onion, salt, Szechuan pepper corns, celery and bay leaves for a couple of hours. strain and discard the solids. The fat will form a crust on top, you can either use or discard this; yes it adds a large quantity of fat but it also holds a lot of the flavour.
once you have your marinaded beef and your stock ready chop all the veg into stir fry compatible pieces, I prefer long thin slices for most things.
Beef and stock ready to go
Veg, chopped and ready to go in. The chilli and onion are separated as they go in first.
For the stir fry, heat a wok over high heat and add the oil. Add the marinated beef and stir-fry for two minutes.
Add the red chilli and onion and stir-fry for less than a minute then add the rest of the vegetables and stir-fry for another minute.
Heat and add the stock, stir well. Add the light soy sauce to season.
Bring to the boil, add the cornflour and water paste and mix thoroughly so it doesn’t form lumps.
Chop and add the spring onion and season.
serve immediately from the wok.
This was a show-stopping stir-fry needing an accompaniment that could hold it’s own in such a feast. It could only be:
Singapore noodles
Ingredients
trimmed pork tenderloin
3 tbsp dark soy sauce
2 tbsp Shaoxing rice wine
2 tsp soft light brown sugar
½ tsp Chinese five spice powder
3 tbsp sunflower oil
100g fine egg noodles (vermicelli egg noodles)
red onion
red pepper
shiitake mushrooms, sliced
2 garlic cloves
20g grated fresh root ginger
2 tsp medium Madras curry powder
200g prawns
artfully sliced spring onions
The pork
trim the pork of all it’s fat and gristle, you want it nice and lean.
Put the pork fillet in a bowl and pour over the soy sauce and sherry. Stir in the sugar and five spice powder and leave to stand for at least 30 minutes, turning it in the marinade.
Place the pork on a baking tray, keep the marinade. Drizzle with one tablespoon of the oil and roast for 12 minutes at 200C. Remove from the oven and set aside to stand.
Cut the pork lengthways in half and then slice into thin pieces.
The Veg
While the pork is cooking, cook the noodles in a separate pan.
stir-fry the onion, red pepper and mushrooms until they soften and get some colour.
Add the garlic and ginger and stir-fry for one minute. Sprinkle the curry powder into the pan and cook for two further minutes.
Combine
Add the pork to the hot pan along with the prawns and spring onions. Stir-fry for one minute then add the drained noodles and marinade. Mix together, cook for 2-3 minutes until the prawns are done and everything’s hot. Serve immediately.
And finally, no Chinese meal would be complete without:
Egg-fried rice
Ingredients
1 egg
2 tsp sesame oil
2 tbsp vegetable oil
200g long-grain rice cooked and left to go cold
100g peas
spring onions, finely chopped
100g beansprouts
1-2 tsp soy sauce
ground white pepper
Method
Rinse the rice thoroughly, you want as much starch off as possible before cooking as grain separation is all important in good egg fried rice.
Cook the rice using the absorption method. After rinsing cover the rice in twice its depth of water and bring to the boil, simmer for 2 mins and then stir, cover and switch off the heat. don’t touch it again until cool! if you have water to drain off you added too much to start with.
Beat together the egg and sesame oil.
Heat the vegetable oil in a wok or large frying pan. When it’s shimmering and almost smoking, add the rice and stir-fry for about 3-4 minutes until completely heated through. try to get the grains to separate but not break up. Gently does it!
Add the peas, spring onions and beansprouts and stir-fry, turning the rice constantly around the pan, for about 3 minutes. Season well with soy sauce and pepper. Pour the beaten egg mixture into the pan and swirl the egg around. Stir-fry for a further minute and serve straight away.
My lens was getting a bit steamed up at this point from all the cooking!
As if you weren’t stuffed enough there’s one more part to go. Gyoza dumplings. No Chinese New Year would be complete without these tasty little packages so loosen off that belt for part 3!
Just looking at this picture again makes me want some right now!
On February 8th this year we have that glorious excuse to set stuff on fire and eat as much delicious Chinese food as we physically can. Not having done much Chinese cooking before last year I thought Chinese New Year was a good opportunity to experiment, learn a few things and feed some friends. The results were good, so good I’m doing it all again this year.
Here are a couple of the recipes I did last year starting with two of my favourite starters: Pork Yuk Sung and Vegetable Spring rolls.
Firstly, I know it’s obvious, but getting the authentic ingredients really matters. There is sure to be an Oriental/Asian supermarket near you, find it and use it! Here’s my selection to make last year’s feast.
Fairly extreme but this is for the whole meal not just these two recipes.
Once you’re stocked up it seems very clear the second most important thing in Chinese cookery is 90% of your time is prep, 10% is cooking. Onto the recipes.
Pork Yuk Sung
Ingredients
iceberg lettuce
ground pork (1/2 a Kg in my case)
fresh ginger
garlic cloves
spring onions
1 celery stalk
A can of water chestnuts
dark soy sauce
oyster sauce
Chinese rice wine
1tsp sugar
sesame oil for frying
Chop the ginger, garlic, spring onion, celery and water chestnuts very finely so they have the same texture as the minced pork. We are talking small here!
Peel off whole lettuce leaves and place them in a bowl on the table.
Mix together the soy sauce, oyster sauce, rice wine and sugar.
Heat the sesame oil until very hot. Don’t be tempted to use another oil, you will notice the difference in the flavour from the oil. Fry the garlic, ginger, and spring onions until soft.
Add the minced pork and cook until the pork is browned.
Add the water chestnuts, and celery to the frying pan and cook over a medium heat. Then put in the sauce mixture.
Reduce and mixture until it is all nicely coated in a sauce and wont run out of your lettuce.
Take the mixture to the table and serve in the lettuce.
I could happily have this as a whole meal. In fact I have done exactly that since!
Vegetable Spring Rolls
Ingredients
grated carrot
2tbsp cannellini beans
50g bean-sprouts
1 sliced spring onion
¼ of a sliced red pepper
1tbsp sweet chilli sauce
sheets of ready-made filo pastry
vegetable oil, for greasing
Preparation method
Preheat the oven to 220C/425F/Gas 7.
Chop all the veg into fine strips then mix and add the sweet chilli sauce.
Lay a piece of filo pastry on the work surface in a diamond shape. Brush with a little oil, then cover with another piece of pastry. Brush with more oil.
Spoon some of the filling onto the edge nearest you.
Fold this edge towards the centre and tuck it under the filling. Fold the two outside edges in towards the middle so it looks like an envelope. Brush with oil, then roll up the pastry to look like a sausage. Repeat with the remaining mixture and pastry.
Bake in the oven for 15-20 minutes, or until crisp and golden-brown.
Sorry for the quality of the images from this point, the kitchen was getting a little steamy!
Serve with a variety of dipping sauces and enjoy!
Next up, The main course, Sichuan pepper beef stir-fry, egg fried rice and Singapore Noodles.
It’s been a while since I posted anything about brewing but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been happening. In the last 3 months I’ve added 4 new brews to the cupboard and given the gift of home-brew to many a happy relative over Xmas.
The new additions are:
Bluebeery
Goosebeery
Strawbeery
and (are you sensing a theme here!)
…..MPF Pilsner
I ran out of berries!
This year I wanted to get as much of the garden into the beer as possible and with my new blueberry and gooseberry plants cropping well I started there.
Bluebeery and Goosebeery
ripening nicely!
To make a fruit beer there are 2 places you can add the fruit, the primary fermentation, where you first make the wort, or the secondary fermentation in the bottles/barrel. The received wisdom is you get more flavour from additions in the secondary fermentation stage but for this beer I didn’t want it to be too overt so I went for the primary stage addition.
First harvest a good quantity of fruit. Harvest, freeze and keep harvesting until you have enough for your recipe.
Little and often in my case.
Harvesting encourages the plants to go on fruiting due to the fruit feeding back a hormonal signal to tell the plant it’s done it’s reproductive duty. Harvest the fruit, remove the feedback and the plant goes on fruiting. See the Rose jam post for more detail on this.
Once you have what you want, in my case 400g of each fruit get ready to brew. As always hygiene is paramount, clean and sterilise everything well before you start and practice good aseptic technique throughout. For these recipes I chose to split a can of Brewmaker IPA malt between 2 buckets so 10L of each beer was made in the end.
Fruit ready to goboil up the fruit in 1l of water and warm the can of malts in a pan of hot water, no need to hard boil this. obviously make sure the yeast is removed first!
Once all your fruit is boiled down to a pulp strain through muslin, making sure to push as much through as possible to get the finished liquid. You have the option here if beer clarity is all important to you to treat the liquids with pectolase to remove the pectin. Not such a problem in the Bluebeery as it’s low in pectin anyway but the Goosebeery will come out with a haze if you don’t do this. However, as this process involves cooling the liquid and leaving the enzyme to work for a number of hours I opted, for the sake of hygiene, to omit this step and enjoy a hazy beer. More on pectin here.
straining the gooseberriesThe 2 liquids then go into buckets.
To this I added 500g of dextrose and half the, now softened, malts. Add more sugar if you want more alcohol but bear in mind the fruit has fermentable sugars in the form of sucrose and its components glucose and fructose.
Make up to 10L and add in the yeast making sure the temperature is between 18 and 22 for best results. Measure the specific gravity with your hydrometer (details below) to get an idea of the alcohol you can expect then leave to ferment. Once the SPG is down below 1.014 you can bottle.
Sterilise enough bottles for 10L of liquid making sure you can cap or otherwise seal all of them. Add 5g of sugar to the bottles to give the beer something to ferment with and add the fizz to the beer then syphon the beer into the bottles. Cap as soon as possible and store upright in a cool dark place for at least 2 weeks before drinking. My final SPG came out as 1.010 for both from a 1.040 start giving me ~4.5%ABV.
Goosebeery (left) Bluebeery (right)
Strawbeery and MPF Pilsner
After the success of the previous 2 beers I wanted to do another and then conveniently enough a smallholding friend of mine gave me 2.5Kg of strawberries after having a hell of a glut from her fruit patch. For this one I was going to go all out after the relative subtlety of the bluebeery and goosebeery. I decided to add fruit at both the primary and secondary fermentation stages for an all out strawberry experience. At the same time a friend of mine had a birthday coming up and he’d been known to dabble in brewing. We got chatting and what he said he wanted was a really light, really hoppy, really strong beer. Hence with the other half of my malts I made exactly that!
Both beers started as above but with a coopers pilsner malt. Coopers are an Australian company but are widely available in the UK and make really good quality malt kits.
For this brew I boiled up 1Kg of the strawberries, strained, cooled and treated the liquid with pectolase to remove some of the pectin. I then heated the liquid to ensure sterility which will have also denatured the enzymes.
1Kg In a pan with 1L of waterAll boiled upStrained and treated, ready for the bucket.
For the other brew I went to town with the hops. 30g of both Fuggles, an English variety and Challenger, full of that Sierra Nevada, high note American charm were boiled in a muslin bag to make a hop tea in 1L of water
Both liquids were added to the buckets with the following:
Strawbeery: 500g dextrose, 300g enhancer
MPF Pilsner: 500g dextrose 700g enhancer
topped up to 10L with cold water they were ready for the yeast. The worts were measured as 1.052 and 1.068 respectively
Guess which is the strawbeery!
Fermentation took a little longer with these 2 as pilsners use a bottom fermenting yeast meaning less of the interesting chemistry you get with a top fermenting yeast goes on leading to a ‘cleaner’ expression of the grain. or so they say, I’m always reminded of this however!
The secondary ferment and bottling for the MPF pilstner was perfectly standard as described above and in my other brewing posts. It did exacly as asked though and came in at ~8%! The Strawbeery however was a little more unusual. I wanted to get the strawberries in at this point too but had to be careful as too much sugar at this stage causes explosions.
I settled on making a really concentrated strawberry sauce making sure the whole lot had no more than 5g of fermentable sugars per bottle I was filling. As I was aiming at 20 bottles that’s no more than 100g sugar total. The problem is simple carbohydrates are exceptionally soluble with water and the amount in the fruit is unmeasurable. Fortunately you can easily find the amounts of sugar in your average strawberry from nutritional information. This will give you an upper limit which as long as you dont exceed you wont get explosion. This told me that if I added 500g of strawberry to the pot this was 23g of sugar. Add the other 77g of sugar in the form of regular granulated sucrose and we’re there. All I did then was take the resultant liquid and divide its volume by 20 and there was no way I could be over my 5g per bottle maximum.
The challenge was to get all that sugar into a small enough volume for practical addition to the bottles.
start the boil!A long while and a lot of filtering and boiling later and you have this! ~200ml of liquid so 10ml per bottle.
Funnel into your bottles and you’re good to start syphoning. Nb I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again a £2.99 paddling pool for bottling in makes a world of difference!
On the same day I was also bottling some other things, ciders, pear wines etc, so the kitchen looked pretty pleasing at the end of this session.
Give them 2 weeks before drinking and at ~6.5% you have what has been one of my most popular brews over Xmas.
As you will no doubt have noticed the overwhelming popularity of pulled pork has reached fever pitch the world over
(ok maybe not everywhere!)
Surely this rise in consumption is not sustainable and the great pork wells shall inevitably start running dry? Even if we find the porky equivalent of modern extraction techniques….
Frackling?
It cant go on forever.
As many experts have said we need to move towards a low bacon economy or at least towards being pork-neutral. Maybe Sweden will get there first and show us the way, although their Danish neighbours aren’t doing too well in this regard. In addition the term “pulled-pork” in the UK has taken on rather different connotations of late….
What does this guy and his money-addled bunch of psychotic cronies have to do to be given the chop? (pun intended!) Favourite #piggate image though was this (don’t click if you have kids as CBBC will never be the same!)
Reducing meat consumption generally is a good idea and aiming for high welfare is a no brainer. However there may be a benefit to pulled-pork’s popularity in that you can use any part of the pig to make it. In the UK we suffer from the ridiculous problem of carcass balance. This means we export the front half of the pigs we grow and slaughter then import rear ends as they have the more popular cuts. This is ludicrous as if we are going to kill and eat animals, and I’m of the opinion we are, we owe it to them to give them a good life, a good death and make use of every part. So with that in mind here is my take on the darling dish of every pub which offers things in buns.
Slow Cooker Pulled Pork.
For this recipe I’m using a shoulder cut of a carcass I butchered myself down in the New Forest with my mum dad and sister; yes this is the kind of day out we have together.
An opportunity to butcher a pig with a New Forest butcher. Any day with crackling, trotters and chain-mail is going to be a good day!
There are lots of methods advocating a slow roast approach however this can be prone to drying out; my method is bulletproof and can be left cooking for as long as you want.
Start with your pork, a few onions, a few celery sticks and a few cloves of garlic. Peel, chop, chuck in slow cooker.Add the following:
1 tbsp of English mustard
1 tbsp of paprika (smoked is preferable)
1 tbsp salt
140g tomato ketchup
4 tbsp red wine/cider vinegar
1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
3 tbsp soft dark brown sugar
Black pepper
All values are approximate, you should certainly experiment.
Once in add 4 bay leaves.And here’s the trick, add water to make up the stewing liquid but cut it 50:50 with apple juice. As we all know pork and apple are best friends.Cover and stew on a low heat for at a minimum 3 hours. The longer the better, you want that pork falling to bits.
Once you’ve got to this stage simply remove the meat into one bowl and sieve the liquid into another, The stock veg are now superfluous.
The next step is obvious, Take 2 forks and pull the fibres apart. Either add back a little of the reserved liquid or thicken it with a little flour and use as a sauce.I served mine with a few home made chips and some steamed veg but in a bun, on some form of crusty bread, topping a burger, the world is your pork-oyster!
topped up to 10L with cold water they were ready for the yeast. The worts were measured as 1.052 and 1.068 respectively
microholding science 
